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Stolen votes yield a hollow victory for Khartoum

Vote-fixing in an election lacking any credibility has galvanised opposition in the North and may undermine the ruling party

A beaming President Omer Hassan Ahmed el Beshir waved his stick triumphantly as his victory was announced in Khartoum on 26 April. Yet the ruling Nati...

SUDAN

A good vote in Africa

Free, fair and good-humoured. They were organised and monitored entirely by Sudanese and their results were widely accep...

SUDAN

The deals, the votes and the fraud

There was plenty of rigging and fixing of votes across the country but sometimes the best laid plans went awry.

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Africa’s journalists are being caught up in increasingly paranoiac, and sometimes murderous, national politics. On 24 April, three journalists in Nigeria were killed in two separate incidents: Edo Sule Ugbagwu of The Nation was gunned down at home, and Nathan Dabak and Sunday Bwede of the Light Bearer were killed while reporting the communal violence in Jos. In neighbouring Cameroon, three journalists – Serge Sabouang, Robert Mintya, and Ngota Ngota Germain – are being held in Yaoundé’s Kondengui gaol accused of trying to discredit the Secretary General of the Presidency, Laurent Esso. And the government of Congo-Brazzaville has suppressed evidence about the burning to death of Franco-Congolese journalist Bruno Jacquet last year. Last week, several African reporters explained to the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva how they chased stories such as human trafficking, arms smuggling and corporate connivance in corruption. Among the speakers were Mary Akuffo (Ghana), Annie Mpalume (Zimbabwe) and John Grobler (Namibia), all of whom investigated illegal mining operations. Joining them were Frank Nyakairu (Uganda), who wrote some groundbreaking reports on human trafficking, and Ken Opala (Kenya), whose stories on conditions for prisoners on death row have sparked calls for prison reform in Kenya. More than ever, their voices are needed.

ECONOMY | AFRICA

Out of the dip

The hiatus in Africa’s economic growth caused by the global financial crisis appears to have been ‘mercifully brief’, according to the International Monetary Fund’s Africa Director, Antoinette Sayeh.

KENYA

Worrying the witnesses

Claims that a senior official in the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) has been handing over information to politicians about witnesses to the 2007 post-election violence threaten the viability of local enquiries into the killings as well as the investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is due to start formally next month.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Warming up in Cape Town

In a challenge to the rich economies of the West, South Africa, Brazil, China and India are calling for a legally binding global agreement to limit climate change. Their new block, with South Africa replacing Russia in the BRIC group of Brazil, Russia, India and China, adds the acronym ‘BASIC’ to the United Nations’ vocabulary. A meeting of their environment ministers in Cape Town on 26 April demanded agreement by 2011 at latest and may give fresh momentum to the initiatives that ran into the sand at December’s UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Key points from Copenhagen

At the United Nations’ climate change summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, African governments won a victory by stopping attempts by the West to kill off the Kyoto Protocol, agreed in 1997. Under the Kyoto deal, the richer countries are legally obliged to cut their emissions. The concession followed a standoff, culminating in a five-hour walkout, led by the African states. Sudan’s Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, Chief Negotiator for the G-77 group of 132 less industrialised countries, which Khartoum currently heads, said: ‘We won because Africa and other countries stood up’.

NIGERIA

The gung-ho Governor

Nine months after he ordered the sacking of six bank chief executives and took their institutions into state management, the Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, has lost none of his reforming zeal. A bill drawn up by Sanusi and his officials to set up an Asset Management Company is likely to be passed in the National Assembly by the middle of next month. This state-backed company will take over the debts of ten distressed banks, allowing them to raise capital. Sanusi expects at least five of the weak banks to merge with some of the stronger institutions in the market.

ZAMBIA

The battle around Banda

Rupiah Bwezani Banda came to office by accident in November 2008, on the death of President Levy Mwanawasa. He hopes to win another election next year and has the advantage of incumbency. Yet he faces challenges from several senior members of the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), as well as from some of the opposition leaders who once backed him. The scene is set for the most fiercely contested poll since the advent of multiparty rule in Zambia 19 years ago.

ZAMBIA

Tax and spend

The big mining houses are predictably grumbling about the Zambian government’s plans for a 25% windfall tax on copper and cobalt production. President Rupiah Banda is standing firm, with unexpected allies: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank back his revenue-raising schemes. As mining profits soar, the Fund and Bank have released research about poor contractual terms on projects in Congo-Kinshasa and Ghana. Too many projects, they say, fail to generate significant numbers of jobs and state revenues are low compared to those in Asia and Latin America. The mining houses reply that African projects require much more investment in infrastructure and involve more political risk.

GUINEA BISSAU

A runaway army

The latest military coup to rock the tiny state of Guinea Bissau began on 1 April, when a pickup truck full of armed and drunken soldiers arrived at the United Nations office in Bissau and demanded to see José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, the former head of Guinea Bissau’s navy. They said they had been sent by General António Indjai, the Deputy Chief of Staff. Bubo Na Tchuto then signed a document in which he promised not to harm any person or property, left the compound and went to the office of Prime Minister Carlos Domingos Gomes Junior (‘Cadogo’), where he and Gen. Indjai launched a coup.

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SENEGAL

Fifty years on, forget the first forty

Fifty years of independence, with no break in democratic rule, might seem a sufficient cause for celebration in Senegal. Yet President Abdoulaye Wade chose instead to celebrate his own ten years in office. His persistent emphasis on his government’s achievements and his apparent attempt to arrange that his own son succeed him enwrap the festivities in controversy and political manoeuvring. At the heart of the row is an immense statue of a man, woman and child, slightly taller than the United States’ Statue of Liberty at 48.77 metres tall. The African Renaissance, which cost between US$20 million and $27 mn., is situated on the heights called the ‘Mamelles’ (Breasts), facing the Atlantic Ocean above Dakar.

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Africa Confidential In The News

Reuters, 16 January 2012
UPDATE 1-Nigeria: will it fall apart or can it hold?
[Goodluck Jonathan is] "eerily calm considering we could be weeks away from a major confrontation," said Africa Confidential editor Patrick Smith. "The absolute failure ... to wheel on southerners and northerners at the same time to say this is a national crisis and we have to pull together, is striking."

BBC Newshour, 14 January 2012
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Africa Confidential's editor Patrick Smith speaks to Julian Marshall in the special focus on Nigeria.

BBC Newsnight, 24 August 2011
Risk Islamists will move in to fill Libya power vacuum
Colonel Muammar Gaddafi claimed that if he was ousted from power Islamist radicals would seize control of Libya. Patrick Smith speaks to Newsnight's Robin Denselow about whether he is likely to be proven right or wrong.

BBC, 16 August 2011
Solomon Mujuru: Obituary of a Zimbabwean 'king-maker'
"He had all the mystique of a liberation war hero that has served him to present-day politics," Patrick Smith, editor of the London-based Africa Confidential magazine, told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

TIME Magazine, 1 June 2011
Death, Prison or Exile: Gaddafi Is Out of Options
"My understanding is that they would be delighted if he did a duck," Smith says.